Durban - Since the beginning of December, the eThekwini Municipality’s electricity department has faced escalating attacks on its infrastructure, with cable thieves striking during load shedding.
Head of electricity in the municipality, Maxwell Mthembu, yesterday detailed the unit’s extensive challenges.
Mthembu spoke to “The Mercury” as the unit has come under pressure because of prolonged power outages in some areas.
Councillors in areas such as Sherwood and Bonela have complained about outages, especially during the festive season. Some of these areas have been out again since Sunday.
DA councillor Ernest Smith alleged that part of the problem was that the city had allowed many of its in-house staff to go on leave, which left the remaining staff struggling to respond.
Mthembu said a challenge they had faced since December was cable theft when there was load shedding at night.
“In the area of Luganda, near Klaarwater, we have noticed that every single night when there is load shedding, our cables that connect to the houses are stolen. The thieves steal all the cables that are connecting houses in one night, and it costs no less than R5 000 to repair and reconnect those houses,” said Mthembu.
He said the city had to fix cables to 30 or more houses daily.
“We request the community to monitor their own infrastructure and question things they find suspicious. If they see someone carrying cables, they should question if that person is working for the electricity department.”
Highlighting another criminal incident, he said his staff were attacked and robbed at gunpoint as they tried to install a high-voltage cable.
“While they were offloading this big cable from the truck, criminals came and pointed firearms at my staff and stripped the cable of copper. That cable is very expensive. This happened in broad daylight and the community ‘saw nothing’,” he said, adding that his staff were now fearful of returning to the site.
“Now I have to organise an army (metro police and private security) to go with us to that site and protect us while we lay down this cable because once it is live, it would be very difficult to steal it. These are the challenges that we have to deal with, and people wonder what is happening when we say the unit has no money,” he said.
Mthembu said it was not true that the unit had allowed many of its in-house staff to go on leave.
“Some went on leave but most were there, working. The issue is that if they had worked the whole night repairing faults, they would have to rest. We are working with electricity here, (an accident could happen) and they could die.
“We were responding to faults, but the challenge was people were not getting through to the call centre because of the sheer volume of calls,” he said.
He admitted that the power outages had led to frustration among residents, and said that in one incident staff had been met with an irate community when they went to fix a fault after a transformer had fallen on a house.